VLVL "happy ending"?

[jbor]

Prairie returns to the woods after escorting Alexei to the Vomitones' van.
She doesn't tell anybody about the attempted kidnapping by Brock, and she
isn't aware of the fact that Brock's funding has been pulled and that he
won't be back. She has mixed emotions, certainly, as had Frenesi and Sasha
before her, but she actively *wants* him to return and take her away -- "she
couldn't let go", "her promises grew more extravagant ..., her flirting more
obvious" as she indulges in her "Brock fantasies" (384-5).

That Desmond the dog is the one to find her and lead her back to her
"family" on Sunday morning is a bit like the ending of an episode from a bad
sit-com for sure, a "happy ending" in a thoroughly improbable and schmaltzy
'Brady Bunch' kind of way. But this more than anything highlights Pynchon's
point that one or all of her parents and grandparents should have been
looking out for her safety and welfare all along, rather than fobbing it off
on anyone and everyone else (the Tube, Isaiah, the Mafia, DL and Takeshi,
Alexei, the pet dog etc). It's their negligence, self-deceit and
selfishness, their collusion with their social and political oppressors,
their outright betrayals, and the predicament in which Prairie finds herself
as a result of all this, which comprises the bulk of Pynchon's narrative and
the novel's main focus after all.

As a reflection on U.S. history in the 20th Century leading up to Reagan's
re-election in 1984 _Vineland_ is indeed a scathing review of the failures
and hypocrisy of "the left" in America, and Pynchon's satire is evident on
every page of the novel. That doesn't make it an endorsement of "the right",
however, far from it.

best

>> but isn't it a bit out of character for
>> Frenesi the Betrayer, the biggest cop lover in the
>> novel, to be fronting these thoughts for Pynchon?
>> What's happening here, we think, is that Pynchon is
>> starting to set up Frenesi for her rehabilitation as
>> part of the big Happy Ending.
>> 
>> http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter15.htm
> 
> The idea that "Frenesi is fronting these thoughts for Pynchon" holus bolus is
> a pretty simplistic one. They are no more (and no less) "Pynchon's thoughts"
> than are Brock Vond's insights into the psychology of the student radicals,
> his "genius" (269).
> 
> And not only is the notion that the novel has a "big Happy Ending"
> questionable at best, where's there any evidence of Frenesi's
> "rehabilitation"? Prairie's reunion with her mother is a let-down for the girl
> (375.6-18), and it seems to be the spur for her escape, "totally familied out"
> (374), into the "solitude" (375) of the forest, yearning for Brock Vond to
> come back and whisk her away from it all (384).
> 
> It's noteworthy that Prairie tells Zoyd that meeting Frenesi was "like meeting
> a celebrity" (375) which, as well as referring to the mediated relationship
> she has had with her -- to Prairie, Frenesi "had been a girl in a movie" (367)
> -- intimates that maybe Frenesi will end up doing Hector's big anti-drug movie
> after all. Symbolically-speaking, Hector and Frenesi's dance (350) seems to
> have sealed a contract of some sort.